folks you need to understand that the eradication of trained artists and designers is a much, much, much bigger threat to arts and culture than IP laws.
why do you think is it that every movie poster the same collage of a bunch of faces? why does every website made after 2015 look the same and rendered unusable by the same ugly pop ups? why does it keep getting harder to differentiate the apps on your phone? Why can't the back of the book just fucking tell you what the book is about?
look I'm a graphic designer. when I started studying design I had clear career goals. I spent like, thousands of hours on studying effective visual communication, psychology, history, grid systems, color theory, typography, print and digital design techniques, accessibility like whatever I believed would make me better at design I poured myself into it.
and within the span of like. five years maybe. 90% of design work disappeared. By the time I graduated there were basically no graphic designers. After 2012 Every company decided that design itself is trivial and true designers should know how to code. And manage social media. And do video editing. And copywrite. and this. and that. and. and. and. and as previous generations of visual designers and illustrators retired, the people who had the luxury of putting all their time into developing specific set of skills, they were replaced with tech grifters and designers who were forced to learn a dozen different skills and were at best mediocre at everything.
my job is not threatened by AI automation because it has already been ruined by automation through canva and bootstrap. and no one even tried to put a stop to it because good design is hard to understand and easy to imitate. so people started to imitate the visuals of previous good design and thought that was all there is to design. and after 10 years of copies of copies of copies we're all asking each other: "why does everything look the same"
now illustrators fear the same will happen to their field. and some of them want stricter copyright laws rights, because there is nothing else that can protect their work. "theft" is the only legal protection they have. and yeah, IP laws suck. but it's better for them to defend their labor using shoddy laws than not at all. and if you allow unimaginative grifters to displace artists from the few creative fields where they still work you won't even have a reason to worry about IP laws.
